A. Implementing CRM Theories is not Readily Accomplished
A goal of CRM is to help a business maximize the value of its customer relationships by enhancing cost-to-serve and revenue opportunities. By better understanding customers' needs and the value they bring to the business, a company can tailor the way it markets, sells, and services customers so that customers who contribute to the profits of the business will buy more, but more profitable products or services, buy them more often, and continue to do business with the company. To put this model into practice, a company should be proficient in one or more areas. For example, a company may need to be proficient in: (1) defining a customer strategy; (2) aggregating customer data; (3) drawing insights into customers' needs based upon analysis of the customer data; (4) defining appropriate customer treatments based upon customer insights; (5) applying treatments in real-time or batch, regardless of the channel used by the customer to interact with the business; (6) capturing the results of the interactions and feeding it back into the insight process so more accurate assessments can be made in ensuing cycles.
Companies have had difficulty developing and implementing both individual proficiencies and end-to-end proficiencies required to achieve the goals of CRM. Some companies have developed customer data warehouses containing historical customer transaction data, sometimes appended with household data. Some companies have developed analytical programs that have run against the data warehouse to determine effective marketing programs. And finally, some companies have been able to take the results of customer insights to manually tailor interactions with customers through specific customer interaction channels.
Companies have struggled in the proficiency and process of defining a customer experience and associated treatments. Presently, there is no process to holistically define the customer experience across all contact points, products and services, and there are also no tools to capture and automate treatments in a systematized approach. Most organizations today determine experiences on an ad hoc basis and in a silo fashion across marketing, sales, and service. This ultimately creates inconsistent experiences and treatments across channels as well as increases maintenance of all the channel applications.
But while certain companies have had limited success at implementing some of the proficiencies individually, companies are challenged to implement all of the capabilities needed to completely realize goals of CRM. Companies have struggled to implement insight driven interactions. This includes a systematic, fact-driven process for defining customer treatments tailored to individual customer segments, applying the intended treatments in real-time (or batch) across the various interaction channels, and feeding back the interaction results to re-train the analytical models. They have not been able to leverage the process of defining intended customer interactions such that it actually feeds the data repository needed to drive the actual interactions. They have not been able to streamline the process of building analytical models and driving the results into interactions quickly enough to optimize the results. They have not had a centralized means by which they could define and implement intended customer treatments across all customer interaction channels.
B. Maintaining Treatments is Time Consuming
Since delivering the appropriate customer experience is essential to CRM, companies may desire to control the various interactions between a customer and the company in order to enhance or optimize the resulting experience. There are presently systems that assist a company in interacting with customers. For example, IVR systems allow a customer to use a telephone to find out a balance and payment due date as a type of self-service interaction. Or, a customer service representative may rely on a CRM software system to retrieve and store information about a customer when the customer calls about a problem. Unfortunately, these systems rely on their own rules processing and internal code/configurations to make interaction decisions based on customer insight. Since each business division and each contact channel has different requirements for an interaction system, each system is typically coded, modified and configured individually to meet specific business requirements. Once a customized system has been created, it requires continual maintenance and may be difficult and/or time consuming to recode, reconfigure or update. Whenever a modification to the system is to be made, a new process of defining requirements, developing designs, and building the modifications must take place. This is very time consuming and inefficient, especially for any systems that are tightly coupled with backend systems, and code that is not well documented or modularized, such as IVR systems. In addition, most businesses support more than one contact channel. Trying to create a consistent experience across more than one channel system (i.e. IVR, Web, Agent Desktop, E-Mail, Kiosk, etc.) requires code changes to occur on all channels which is again time consuming and inefficient. For example, an organization may want to present a certain type of offer to customers via an IVR system and a Internet website. Whenever a customization is to be made to how a customer can receive a specific treatment—such as receiving the same offer whether on the web or in the IVR—modifications must be made to the IVR system as well as to the web server. Modifying a number of channels to incorporate one change is inefficient and often error prone.
In addition, working across functionality is also inefficient and error prone. Because many organizations are aligned around channels (i.e., IVR, Web, Agent) or functions (i.e., Marketing, Sales, Service) as opposed to customer or customer segments, the effort to define and build consensus, document, and act on consistent strategies is a challenge. Often, these barriers exist because of misaligned priorities (generate sales versus lower cost to serve versus maximize customer lifetime value), misaligned incentive programs (higher commissions for new sales versus retention cross sales activities), and/or focus on channel as “the in solution”—i.e., web. Aspects of the present invention facilitate breaking down these barriers by taking a broad perspective of the customer lifecycle, the ways to drive value across the relationship by focusing on marketing, sales, billing and service actions, as well as channels.
Because coding is involved when making changes to the web, IVR, agent desktop or any other channel, the change must be implemented by someone in the IT department of the business. Whenever, for example, a business' marketing department develops a new campaign and wishes to add a new customer treatment to a channel it may require two time-consuming steps in the implementation cycle by specialized IT resources: (1) translating the treatment into technical specifications that will meet the business outcomes for the target customer segment (e.g., increased customer satisfaction, increased sales, etc.), and (2) scheduling and completing the implementation of the request. Meanwhile the marketing department (or other team requesting the treatment change) must wait for the updates and modifications to be implemented.
The need for constant customizations and modifications also creates an opportunity for inconsistencies. Either the modification may not be made to all the interaction channels, or the new prompts and content may be added differently to each contact channel. Or, current systems for a channel may not offer the same capability as another channel. Additionally, if a customer repeatedly makes the same inquiry, the customer must still proceed through an entire menu for obtaining the desired response. This is also inefficient.
C. To Maximize Value, Customize the Choices Presented to the Customer
As previously mentioned, current customer interaction systems may be customized with options/treatments that are presented to the users. Some of these options may be based on characteristics of the calling customer. For example, in an IVR system, a customer may be able to press or say “1” to hear options in English and to press or say “2” to hear the options in Spanish. The customer's response then determines how the rest of the interaction proceeds (i.e., either in English or Spanish). While some of level of customization is available in existing interaction systems, a systematic approach that offers customization from a central location to all of the communication channels at once is not available.
What is needed is a methodology that can be used systematically and holistically to guide a company to evaluate, implement, improve, and maintain a CRM strategy that can gain and leverage insight about customers through their interactions with the company. What is also needed is a computerized toolset to present and document such a systematic methodology and capture the intended customer treatments for use in controlling the interaction with the customers. Furthermore, what is needed is a computer system that can leverage the information defined by the methodology when interacting with customers to enhance the experience across all interaction channels, where treatments can be quickly manipulated by business users.
What is also needed is a system that can derive insight from interactions to further enhance future interactions with customers. What is also needed is a way to easily, quickly and consistently make modifications to how the interaction with the customer will be delivered. What is needed is a system that can be used by a non-technical employee who understands the business goals and speed-to-market urgency rather than requiring generic programming from an IT professional. When a change is made to the IVR treatments, for example, what is needed is a way to readily make the same change to the website, agent desktop, IVR and all other channels simultaneously with little modifications to the systems.